Over the years I lost count of the number of clients who suggested I should work for less on current briefs - never for free - with the promise of better paying briefs to come. My reply was always "I can't live on promises". Thankfully agents protected me from most clients.

Over the years I lost count of the number of clients who suggested I should work for less on current briefs - never for free - with the promise of better paying briefs to come. My reply was always "I can't live on promises". Thankfully agents protected me from most clients.

Damn! For years I'd imagined that to be peculiar to Scottish clients in the rag trade!

It's been a lotta years since I did a photo shoot for pay. I did a whole bunch of photo shoots for outfits like the Colorado Springs Downtown Partnership for free, but one thing I've never done during my "retirement" is take on a job that a local pro could handle. If there was money involved I always pointed the client at one of my pro friends, one whose work I appreciated, and often one who was struggling to make it.

Nearly all the value of an item or a service is in the labour.There is relatively little value in the atomized components (if one wants to go to that extreme) of my wide-screen TV as an example but plenty of value in its current form. It is only the human intervention that could possibly have got everything together to produce that TV.

IMHO it is really a human rights issue.If you work you must be paid.Nobody should expect one's labour to be provided for free.In the realm of employment - no pay, no value - as simple as that.

One may make a voluntary decision to do this but there should not be an expectation on the part of the employer or contractor that one will work for free.

I am certainly not left-wing in my politics but I fundamentally believe that if one is not paid one's worth then one is worthless.I do not believe I am worthless therefore I want to be paid what I am worth!

The lady who cuts my hair once told me that that when you do something for free, this is the value the customer places on the service.

Hi, Sys, Generally, I agree with you, and I price my gallery prints accordingly. But when I was working for free for the Downtown Partnership, which simply didn't have money to pay a working pro, what I got was coverage in their website. For a long time at least 98% of the photographs on that site were mine. The result was improved gallery sales. Sometimes you have to go 'round Robin Hood's barn to get to where you want to end up.